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gunnarthor

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Everything posted by gunnarthor

  1. gunnarthor
    I think you might be ignoring the pitchers they signed in FA.
  2. gunnarthor
    Profar never played first in the minors. Ian Desmond played 8 innings in the OF in the minors before TX put him in CF this year. Teams do it all the time. Players move down the defensive spectrum. Puckett to right, Yount to the OF, Betts to CF, Napoli to first. As explained above, the Twins had a few options - cut Plouffe for nothing or play Sano in RF. Moving Sano down the defensive spectrum isn't that controversial. The reason it didn't work is probably not because Sano is too big but probably because Sano didn't work hard enough to make the change work.
  3. gunnarthor
    Or, you know, two years ago with Betts to show that it's been a constant thing throughout baseball history but feel free to ignore the examples that you don't like.
  4. gunnarthor
    Sure he is. Sano is a lot more athletic than many athletes from the 70s. Here's some video of the 1972 ALCS - Those guys are not at the level of athletes we see today. It's not even close. It's nice that Winfield got a scholarship for basketball but so did Flip Saunders.
  5. gunnarthor
    Sure. He is also a better athlete than Noel Jenke, Mickey McCarty and Dave Logan. Murphy is right - the differences between players today and the 80s (and the 70s in Winfield's case) is stunning. Offensive linemen didn't weigh 270, now some of them push 400 and run speed drills under 5 seconds. Baseball players are getting bigger and stronger. Sano is among the top tier for that right now but he's not unique and other players will eventually be bigger than him.
  6. gunnarthor
    Sano is probably a better athlete than Murphy and Winfield. The players today are so much bigger, faster, stronger and just better than those from even the 90s. Dale Murphy said this: "“I don’t think I could have played today,” he says. “Hey, I’d love to play now. But, you know what? These kids are better than us. They’re better players. We might not want to admit it, but we go back and look at old highlights of ourselves and compare it to these kids now: No comparison. Everybody throws 95 mph-plus. Their swings are so much more fine tuned. They’re in so much better condition. And they make plays — I watch them and I say, ‘Wow.’ Athletically, I don’t think I could compete today.”" They could have moved Sano to the OF in 2013. Sure. But I don't see why. He was still playing third and learning the game. You don't move players down the spectrum until you have to. They didn't have to and they didn't know he'd miss all of 2014 and be in the majors in July 2015.
  7. gunnarthor
    Good grief. Moving players around at the ML level happens all the time through out baseball history. Dale Murphy was a catcher in the minors and played literally one inning in the OF before Atlanta made him their center fielder. Dave Winfield was drafted as a pitcher, played firstbase in college and never spent a day in the minors. He learned the OF at the ML level. Mookie Betts didn't play in the OF at all until he was pressed into service in Boston. Craig Biggio was a minor league catcher who was moved to CF and 2B in the majors. etc, etc. All of these guys - like Sano - had ML ready bats pretty fast. The argument against Sano is that he was too big but that's not much of an argument. We already see some pretty big OFers out there - Stanton, Trout, Hamilton all look like NFL linebackers out there. Players are rapidly changing and getting much bigger - 270 pound outfielders will happen. The days of 6', 180lb Jack Clark LFers are long gone. The Twins had two choices with Sano - play him at third or play him in right. If they played him at third, it would have meant dropping Plouffe for nothing - there was no market for him. No team is going to make a 22 year old kid the permanent DH without eliminating every other option, especially when they are concerned about his weight. So they put the better defender at third. It didn't work. There were a lot of reasons why it didn't work out - I think the chief one was how little Sano prepared for it. Despite what the Twins said, Twins reporters reported that he didn't do much before ST and didn't seem to be very enthused about the move. Heck, several TD posters noted his apathy in ST toward the move. But the idea that the Twins were wrong to try this because he didn't play it in the minors - esp when he missed a full year in the minors but still made the majors at 21 - is ridiculous.
  8. gunnarthor
    The reason they didn't play him in the OF in the minors was because he missed the entire 2014 season and his bat was ML ready by mid-2015.
  9. gunnarthor
    The new FO has to worry about things like attendance as well as how ownership looks. If they bench Mauer, a lot of casual fans won't be as interested and benching him suggests ownership wasted 40m+ dollars. I doubt the FO is going to make those kind of moves early in their run when they have other things to focus on. And, as bad as Mauer was, he wasn't a complete black hole and it's a pretty open question if Vargas would be better.
  10. gunnarthor
    Barring an injury, I would expect Sano to start the season at third base. The team is stuck with Mauer at one of 1B/DH. My guess is that the new FO will look to see what a Dozier deal looks like and possibly see if they can scare up interest in Kepler but probably not do a lot to that offensive side quite yet. They probably need time to evaluate and they have other priorities (pitching and catcher). I would imagine the lineup would look something pretty close to: C- FA and one of Murphy/Garver/Centeno 1B - Mauer 2B - Dozier SS - Polanco 3B - Sano OF - Rosario/Buxton/Kepler - if those three can hit, are they a good defensive OF? I think they'd be ok but only Buxton would really be elite. Bench - backup catcher/Park/UI/4thOF with the Twins trading one of Park/Vargas Obviously, trading Dozier would make a bunch of changes but several of the positions seem fairly close to set. Sano, Buxton, Rosario, Kepler, Mauer and Polanco will be starting at some position.
  11. gunnarthor
    I didn't want to clip your entire post. Here's the point I'm trying to make. Looking at only players who amassed at least 1 WAR, the Cubs this year got about 22 WAR from FA, that's the largest group of WAR talent on the team. Trades and drafts combined for about 31 WAR. Cleveland got about 8 WAR from FA this year. They got 39 WAR from trades and the draft. That's the model the Twins will have to follow. And the payroll differences of those teams and those groups is gigantic.
  12. gunnarthor
    Things like drafting, trades, development etc are things ALL teams do - it's the reason Cleveland is in the WS this year and the reason the Royals won it last year. No one thinks the Twins can't or shouldn't do that. But comparing the Twins to the Cubs - the "it" team of the moment - is a purposefully false comparison. The Cubs are where they are because of payroll. They wouldn't be the Cubs without that payroll. If they had the limits the Twins had, there is no evidence that they would be in the WS. There is evidence that teams with similar or worse payroll handicaps to the Twins have made the WS and those are the teams we should be looking at.
  13. gunnarthor
    I don't think anyone has suggested that. I think most of us realize that we can't pay our way out of the issues like big payroll teams can. Pretending that the Twins could do what the Cubs did is fantasy. The Cubs are paying their 3 FA starters (Lester, Lackey, Hammel) 50m this year. For all the complaining about how the Twins misspend money for Hughes, Nolasco and Santana, just those three players made 16m less then their Cubs counterparts. And, unlike the Cubs, the Twins aren't going to be able to add 20m in salaries at the trade deadline. Payroll is a huge advantage that, for some reason, people just don't want to accept. When the Cubs 20+m hitter puts up worse numbers than Buxton, it's an inconvenience because that player isn't expected to be the key player for them. That was just the cost of adding a complementary player.
  14. gunnarthor
    As long as the Pohlad's own this team, you're never going to see a high payroll. Cleveland and the Royals are the teams the Twins should be copying. Cleveland traded for Kluber - who was never a top 100 prospect - for example. The Cubs have advantages that the Twins, Royals and Cleveland don't so it doesn't make sense to compare. Teams with 200m payrolls can erase errors that the Twins can't/won't.
  15. gunnarthor
    It seems that we should probably focus on what teams in our payroll (and maybe our league) are doing - maybe the last two WS teams? I get that that Cubs are the "it" team but they really aren't a good comparison to what the Twins can do.
  16. gunnarthor
    We're picking up more Disney stock. Nothing overly sexy about that but we like it and low 90s is a decent area to grab more at.
  17. gunnarthor
    I'm not sure how much his secondary stuff can improve against HS competition - if those kids can't hit his 98 mph fastball, there's not a lot of incentive to not throw it.
  18. gunnarthor
    Do you know who the Twins pitching development people are? Do you know how long they've doing those jobs?
  19. gunnarthor
    Well, barring injury of course. That said, he sounds to me a bit more like (a better) Kolak than Bundy. Bundy was nearly a finished product when he was drafted in 2011. Greene might need more work but his arm is amazing.
  20. gunnarthor
    I think it suggests that the industry weighs the risk of the HS arm a bit more than we fans do. A few LH starters have gone 1-1 (including Brady Aiken) but LH starters are rarer.
  21. gunnarthor
    I certainly won't complain if the Twins take that risk but we have a while before we have to really narrow it down. He has season to pitch yet and some of the college arms could break out as well. I hope they go BPA and I'm hoping that BPA is a college arm.
  22. gunnarthor
    In the first round of that 06 draft, 8 HS pitchers were taken. Two have amassed more than 1 WAR in the majors. Nine of the 16 college arms taken in the first round have amassed more than 1 WAR in the majors. Drafting HS pitchers is risky. I'm good with drafting HS arms but it's important to remember that they don't always work out and it's not necessarily because the team can't develop pitchers. There's a lot that can go wrong and a lot worse possibilities than what Kohl Stewart has shown so far. (And Strasburg was considered a nearly perfect college pitcher who could step into a ML rotation from day one. Not really fair to compare him to a HS pitcher who was working mostly on his football game).
  23. gunnarthor
    Well, what were Smith's big signings in 2010? The rules changed on international signings and the Twins have done pretty well so I'm not sure it's fair to say they haven't spent after Smith. They haven't nabbed a guy as universally acclaimed as Sano but they have spent a lot on guys (Javier) and they've spent their pool. Some years, they've gone quality and some years they've gone quantity. It's a bit too early to say how they've done - Lewin Diaz, for example, signed in 2013, just reached rookie ball. But after 09, they've signed guys like Romero, Jorge, Thorpe, Ynoa, Vielma etc
  24. gunnarthor
    Yeah, but we knew he wouldn't. IIRC, the consensus was the Twins would nab the pitcher that was left - Appel, Gray or Stewart. There was some discussion of the two Georgia OFers but they were secondary to pitching.
  25. gunnarthor
    I don't think anyone doubts that but most of us can see that there are pretty good reasons to hope that those core guys (Vargas is not a core guy) will be pretty good. Kepler had a 2.5 WAR season, Buxton's WAR was 1.9 and that shows his offensive floor is pretty low to be a strong player in the league. Sano's defense was horrible - esp in the OF - but he still hit 25hr and put up a 110 OPS+ in what we all think is a bad year. Mauer hasn't topped 110 since 2013. Berrios did have a disaster season. I also think it's worth remembering - since this is a prospects thread - what the expectations were of these guys. Sano and Buxton were always elite guys and cream of the crop. But Berrios was an undersized supplemental first round pick that developed into a top 15 prospect. Kepler (and Polanco) were big signings for us as Twins fans because it was an exciting year and there was something unique about Kepler but neither were big international signings that year. Both were in the 15-20 range in bonuses. Both developed into pretty darn good prospects. No team will ever draft perfectly - look at how few drafted players are part of the Cubs or Cleveland or even the Nats, for instance. But I do think that Steil and company have done a really nice job of developing players since he took over in 2012. If you get two players out of a draft, it's a good draft and I think most of those drafts we can get at least that.
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